Picture this. You’re standing on a beach on a South Pacific island, wearing thin, comfy clothes. The water is warm around your ankles, the breeze is soft, and the sun is shining on your skin. Now do some yoga. Your hamstrings, your shoulders, your mind: everything feels easy and open. Now keep the same you and the same clothes, but put yourself on a rooftop in Boulder, Colorado. It’s 5:30 pm at the end of a workday and already dark. The air is dry and cold, and there’s an icy wind. Do the same stretches. Everything feels different, doesn’t it? You feel stiffer, a bit on edge, and a little more tense in your body and your mind. Nothing is wrong with you. It’s the weather. That’s the heart of living an Ayurvedic life. The outer environment affects your inner environment, and we adjust accordingly. We don’t expect to feel the same every day. And when something feels off, we don’t automatically decide something is broken. I tell my students all the time: if you want to, you can blame it on the weather. This is also why so many people love hot yoga. Warmth makes you feel more flexible, and the heat is doing part of the work. Why this matters now: In the Western Ayurvedic tradition, fall into winter is Vata season. Vata is cold, dry, light, and moving. When those qualities pile up, the body feels stiff, the skin gets dry, and the mind can feel a bit more anxious or scattered. The Ayurvedic move is simple: find the opposite quality. - Cold and dry? Add warmth and a little oil: warm food, healthy oils in your cooking, a little oil on your skin. - Light and scattered? Eat something a bit heavier and grounding. - Everything moving fast? Do something slow. - Short, dark days? Take your practice outside for even 5 minutes in the sun, dressed warmly, with a hat if you need it. Slow movement plus sunlight is one of my favorite fall habits. We’re not living in a vacuum. We’re part of our environment, and everything affects everything. So pay attention to more than how to stretch your hamstrings (which also matters!). Notice what’s happening around you, and how you can live in harmony with it.

Putting weight onto your upper body can be a fantastic way to work on all of the above provided you know how to align and protect your joints BEFORE adding weight! And that's exactly what we'll practice here. I'll show you step by step how to position your body, protect your joints, and — most importantly — how to listen to the feedback your body gives you so you know you're practicing safely. Here's why I love weight-bearing postures: When your joints are well-aligned for YOUR body, weight-bearing movements can help improve your posture by doing two things at once: ✅ Lengthening muscles that have become too tight. ✅ Strengthening muscles that have become too weak. Both are equally important! Stretching alone isn't always the answer. We need strength to support our flexibility. New to forearm balance? Perfect! We'll build the foundation step by step. Already practicing forearm balance? Use this class to revisit your alignment, refine your technique, and build the strength and confidence to balance at the wall — or eventually in the middle of the room, if that's your goal! And remember our motto: 💛 Stretching with Strength and Self-Respect! Have fun. Have at it! 🐺 👇 Here's your practice: 🔗 YOGA CLASS

Stillness gets all the glory in yoga. Quiet room, soft music, everybody very serious. I love stillness. But I want to make a case for its funny cousin: laughter. Yoga Journal ran a piece this year arguing that teachers should let more humor into class, because when we take ourselves too seriously, people lose interest. I would add: and they lose themselves. Here is my confession. After two decades of teaching, the moments when I connected with my students VERY well, were the moments when I made a mistake and laughed about it. I am German. English still trips me up. My all-time favorite: I mix up “chin” and “shin.” You can imagine what happens when I tell a room full of people to move something toward the wrong one. 😄 Being authentic does not mean becoming the polished yogi who drinks green juice and never has a negative thought. Please. Authentic means showing what is unique about you, and sometimes that is funny. When students see me being a little imperfect, and laughing about it, something lets go. If the teacher does not need to be perfect, maybe I don’t either. That is how we step off the perfectionism edge. And laughing together connects us faster than any cue I could give. Try this today (under a minute): next time you wobble, drop something, or say the wrong word, laugh a little before you fix it. 👉 Come practice with us in the classroom, and pick whatever calls to you: https://www.skool.com/yoga-40-7155/classroom Tell me: what is YOUR chin-and-shin moment? 😄

Most of us are really good at being kind to other people. A friend says "I'm just not good enough at this," and we know exactly what to say. Then it's our own turn, and somehow that ability shrinks. In my years of teaching I have noticed this again and again. Compassion for others comes easily. But when it comes to ourself - self-judgment is much faster. And it often hides behind a good reason: I want to improve. Grow. Get stronger, more flexible, more whatever you're trying to become. The mind likes to build a little gap between where you are right now and where you want to be. If I want to be somewhere else, then what's here must not be good enough. It doesn't have to be that way. That gap creates stress in the body, and in my experience it doesn't close when you reach the goal. The mind just jumps to the next thing it has to achieve to prove it's worthy. Teachers have been saying this for a long time. Kripalu puts it simply: "Yoga practice is not a self-improvement project." Yoga International has written about using yoga to build self-compassion instead of perfecting the shape. So the practice is different. Don't chase the next goal to feel more okay with yourself. Notice the thoughts that say "not good enough yet," and don't give them so much attention. Then spend a little time just being with yourself, without the commentary. When there is only attention and no story, there's not much room left for anything but being okay with what is. In my experience, compassion arise from there on their own. Don't try to understand this logically. Try it. Do any practice in the classroom and pay attention to how the postures feel, not to what you think about them. Or sit with the "Am I Alive" contemplation: AM I ALIVE" SESSION Notice what happens when the narrative of the mind gets less important. Something quieter says: I am okay. Because you are. You already are. You always have been.

Happy Friday, pack! Tomorrow this goes public on YouTube. But you are the ones who practice with me all the time, so you get it TODAY, before everybody else. Here is why I think you will like it: it can help you to feel looser in your hips and low back, and to go into your forward folds WITHOUT that pinching feeling in your sitting bones. That is a very nice thing to bring into a weekend. Why now? Think about your week. Sitting at the desk, sitting in the car, sitting on the couch while the news scrolls by. And this was an eventful week in the US, and honestly for a lot of the world. Whatever IT is that you carried this week, a lot of us carry it in the body. The muscles on the back of your body, from your heels all the way up to your head (the “back chain”, with the hamstrings right in the middle), tend to hold a lot of that. Releasing them can have a very calming effect on your whole being. I see it in my students all the time, and I feel it myself. And then there is the weekend. Hiking, walking on the beach, playing with the grandkids, picking up stuff from the floor, finally cleaning the garage. Your hamstrings should not be the reason you hold back. Let’s give them some attention before you go and enjoy yourself. The part most people miss (me included) Here is the confession: I did this wrong for YEARS, and I see it in classes all the time. You pull your leg toward you, and it looks like a big hamstring stretch. But all that happens is the pelvis tilts, the low back flattens into the floor, and the hamstring gets almost nothing. Very impressive for the mirror, not so useful for the body. 😄 In the video I show you how to catch this and fix it. Not easier, but BETTER: Firm the leg that stays on the floor. I say “a baby elephant is sitting on your thigh.” It keeps your pelvis where it belongs, so the stretch goes into the hamstring and not into your low back. Firm your glutes and draw the low belly in. This protects the place where the hamstring attaches to your sitting bone (the “yoga butt” spot) from being overstretched.